The Man Who Risked It All Page 15

“No, stop!” I told him. “You know I’ll never do that.”

  I glanced toward Catherine, looking for support. She looked as uneasy as I did.

  “You know you’ve no choice,” Dubreuil said.

  “You’re not applying your own principles,” I retorted. “The more I resist, the more you’re using your position of strength.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And that doesn’t worry you? Do as I say, not as I do?”

  “There’s a good reason for it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’ve got power, my friend. Power. So why should I worry?”

  He said that with a satisfied look, smiling. He lifted his glass of white wine to his lips; it was so cold a fine mist had formed on the glass. I took a sip of orange juice. I was annoyed with myself for having confided in him my problem with my neighbor. I led him on and then resented his imposing his solutions on me. Perhaps I was a bit of a masochist, after all.

  The branches of the great cedar tree were perfectly motionless, as if they were holding their breath. The mildness of the evening enveloped us. I looked over at Catherine and suddenly froze. It was there, on her knees. She was holding it with one hand: the notebook. Perhaps she saw my eyes or felt my gaze unconsciously, because she covered the notebook with her other hand.

  A thought went through my mind: What if I just asked to look at it? After all, there was no reason to presuppose anything. Perhaps they’d say yes. Perhaps I was getting all worked up about nothing.

  I carefully assumed an air of indifference.

  “I see my name’s on that notebook. Can I have a look?” I asked Catherine, holding out my hand. “I’m very curious about it.”

  She stiffened, without replying, and looked at Dubreuil.

  “Certainly not!” he said in a final tone of voice.

  It was now or never. I would insist. “If what’s written in it concerns me, it’s only natural I should read it.”

  “Does a film director show the audience his screenplay during the screening of the film?”

  “I’m not the audience here. I’m one of the main actors, it seems to me.”

  “Exactly! An actor acts better when he’s told at the last minute about the scene he’s going to act. He’s more spontaneous.”

  “I’m better when I can prepare in advance.”

  “The screenplay of your life is not written in advance, Alan.”

  The words remained hanging in the air. Catherine looked at her feet.

  I didn’t like this ambiguous reply. What did it mean? That no one can know their destiny in advance? Or that he, Yves Dubreuil, was writing the screenplay of my life? The thought sent shivers down my spine.

  My eyes turned instinctively to the house. The window to the study, on the first floor, was wide open. Underneath was a carved cornice that ran the width of the building. At the corner, there was a stone drainpipe that went down to the ground. It would be very easy to haul myself up to the cornice and from there, to get to the study window.

  I took another salmon canapé.

  “On the subject of power and power relationships, I went through a dreadful experience at the office,” I began.

  I told them about the meeting the day before with Marc Dunker and his mental arithmetic test. Dubreuil listened carefully. I knew I risked being given another painful task, but I was ready to do anything to punish my CEO, and I needed Dubreuil’s creativity. He had Dunker’s strength, plus genius.

  “I want revenge,” I announced.

  “Who are you angry with in this business?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  “Reply.”

  “Who do you think?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “Dunker, of course!”

  He leaned slowly toward me, boring into me with his penetrating gaze.

  “Alan, who are you really angry with?”

  I felt trapped, forced to turn my attention away from an easy answer and look within, question my own emotions. What could be the real object of my anger if it wasn’t Dunker? Dubreuil continued to stare at me, immobile. His eyes were a mirror of my soul. I saw the answer there, suddenly obvious. I whispered: “I’m angry with myself for having given in to his hateful pressure. And for not having passed his filthy test.”

  The silence in the garden seemed oppressive. It was true: I was angry with myself, angry for having allowed a deeply humiliating situation to unfold. But that didn’t stop me from being angry with Dunker as well for having been the origin of all this. I absolutely hated him.

  “It’s his fault, though. It all came from him. I want revenge. By any means. It’s an obsession.”

  “Ha! Vengeance, vengeance! For decades, I thought of nothing else as soon as I was crossed by anyone! How many times have I sought revenge! How many times have I rejoiced to see my adversaries suffer! How many times have I exulted as I made them pay for their deeds! And then, one day, I realized that it was all in vain, that it served no purpose and especially that I was hurting myself.”

  “Hurting yourself?”

  “When you meditate on revenge, you feel an energy that is admittedly very stimulating, but it is a negative, destructive energy, one that pulls you down. You don’t feel enhanced by it. And then there’s another thing. If you take revenge on someone, it’s because he has hurt you. By taking revenge, you try to hurt him back, don’t you? In the end you’re acting like him; you’re adopting his way of functioning. So he has won. He has succeeded in imposing his way of behaving on you, even if he hasn’t done it knowingly. He has forced you to join him in evil.”

  I had never thought of that. It was a rather disturbing way of looking at things. If I managed to harm Dunker, which is what I was dreaming about, it meant he had managed to rub off on me. How horrible! Even so, I wasn’t going to let myself be treated like that without saying anything.

  “You know,” Dubreuil went on, “there will be a lot less wars on this earth the day men stop wanting to avenge themselves. Look at the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. As long as the inhabitants of each camp want to avenge the brother or cousin or uncle killed by the enemy, the war will go on, every day resulting in more dead to be avenged. It will never end until these suffering men and women are helped to come to terms not with their dead but with their vengeance.”

  It was strange, almost incongruous, to talk about war in this haven of peace—the château garden, with its soothing scents, its great reassuring trees, and a calm so entrancing that it was easy to forget the nearby city. But what can seem so obvious when you’re considering other people’s conflicts takes on quite a different cast when they’re your own. The necessity for forgiveness in the Middle East seemed self-evident; forgiving Dunker was out of the question.

  “You say that you hurt yourself when you try to get revenge. I accept that idea, but I have the feeling that stifling my anger would hurt me at least as much!”

  “Your anger produces an energy, a force, and that force can be redirected and used to act in your own behalf, whereas revenge contributes nothing; it just destroys.”

  “That’s all very well in theory, but practically speaking, what should I do?”

  “First of all, you must express what’s on your mind, either by simply saying to this guy what you think of what he did, or by doing it symbolically.”

  “Symbolically?”

  “Yes, you can write him a letter, for example, in which you get it all off your chest and express your resentment—and then throw the letter in the Seine or burn it.”

  I had the feeling I’d missed something.

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “It purges you of the accumulated hatred that’s hurting you. As long as you remain in a state of anger, your mind is obsessed with revenge, and that prevents you from acting in your own best interests. You’re brooding, you keep turning over your grievances, and you’re not moving forward. Your emotions are blocking you; you must free them. A symboli
c act can allow that. And then you can go on to the second phase.”

  “And the second phase, what’s that?”

  “The second phase is using the energy of your anger to take action—for example, to achieve something you would never have dared do. Something constructive that really furthers your interests.”

  The image that came to me was quite ambitious. I dreamed of changing things in my company, of becoming a force for making positive suggestions, rather than continuing to deplore the course of events and moan about it with Alice.

  I would go and meet with Marc Dunker personally. His blunder the day before put him in an awkward position with me. I would take advantage of it. He would be careful not to reject my ideas outright and would be forced to listen to me. I would tell him my observations, my ideas about the company and would try to negotiate putting them to the test. After all, what did I have to lose?

  A shadow passed over my enthusiasm. Why would Dunker follow the ideas of someone whose lack of self-confidence he had himself proved? Given his domineering personality, he must have nothing but contempt for me now.

  I told Dubreuil about my plans and my doubts.

  “It’s certain that self-confidence would greatly help you get what you want at work,” he said.

  I swallowed hard.

  “You promised to work on that.”

  He looked at me in silence for a few moments, and then picked up a glass of water, a stemmed crystal glass of such delicacy that it seemed almost unreal. He held it over the pyramid of saffron and slowly began to tip it.

  “We are all born with the same potential for self-confidence,” he said. “Then we start hearing input from our parents, our nannies, our teachers.”

  A drop of water broke off and fell on the top of the pyramid, forming a sort of lens magnifying each orange strand of the precious spice. The drop seemed to hesitate, then slowly made its way down the slope of the pyramid, gathering speed as it neared the bottom.

  “If by misfortune,” he went on, “their input tends to be negative, criticizing, and blaming, underlining our shortcomings, mistakes, and failures, then the feeling of inadequacy and self-criticism inscribes itself on our way of thinking.”

  Dubreuil tipped the glass again slowly, and a second drop fell in the same place. It, too, hesitated at the top of the cone of saffron and then followed the same path as the first. The third drop did the same, faster than the one before it. After a few seconds, a groove had formed, and each time he poured, the drops rushed down, deepening the groove a little more.

  “Eventually, the slightest clumsiness makes us feel uneasy, the most unimportant failure makes us doubt ourselves, and the most trivial criticism throws us off, leaving us completely at a loss. The brain gets used to reacting negatively; the neural links get stronger with each experience.”

  Clearly this described me. Everything he said spoke to me, echoed within me. So I was one of life’s sacrificial victims, abandoned by my fathers, crushed by my mother for whom I was never good enough. And now, even though I was an adult, I was still paying for a childhood I hadn’t chosen. My parents were long gone, but I was still subject to the harmful effects of their education. I was beginning to feel deeply depressed when I suddenly realized that the depression itself must contribute to making my lack of self-confidence even worse.

  “Is there a way out of this vicious circle?” I asked.

  “It’s not the end, actually. But it’s hard to get out of it. It requires effort.”

  He tipped his head to one side, and depositing another drop of water at the summit of the pyramid, he blew on it sufficiently hard to force the drop to take another direction. It slowly made another path to the bottom.

  “Above all,” he went on, “your efforts must be sustained over time, because our mind is very attached to our habits of thought, even when they make us suffer.”

  He poured a new drop onto the top of the pile, and it rushed down the old groove.

  “What’s needed,” he said, “is …”

  He kept on pouring drops and then blowing on them, so that they were forced to take the new route, gradually forging a groove. After a while he stopped blowing, and the drops rolled down the new path of their own accord.

  “To create new habits in the mind,” he finished. “To dwell on thoughts that are good for self-esteem, that are associated with positive emotions, until new neural links are created, reinforcing each other and then dominating. This takes time.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the beautiful orange pyramid, now incised with two clearly marked grooves.

  “You can’t suppress the mind’s bad habits,” he said. “But it is possible to develop new mental habits and ensure that they become irresistible. You can’t change people, you know. You can just show them a path and then make them want to take it.”

  I wondered how deep a groove my lack of self-confidence had incised. Would I manage one day to carve in myself a confidence, a serenity, when faced with criticism? Would I know how to develop that interior strength that makes us unassailable, since persecutors only seem to attack the most vulnerable of us?

  “So, what do you suggest I do for my problem?” I asked.

  Dubreuil put down the glass of water, poured some more white wine, and then calmly laid back in his armchair and took a sip.

  “First of all, you should know that I am going to give you a task that you must do every day for one hundred days.”

  “For one hundred days?” I squeaked.

  It wasn’t the length of the task that frightened me, but the prospect of being under Dubreuil’s control for such a long time.

  “Yes, one hundred days. It’s what I’ve just explained to you: You can’t create new mental habits overnight. If you carry out the task I’m going to give you for a week, it will do no good. Absolutely none. It requires a long-term commitment—repeating it for such a long time that its effects take root in you.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s very simple, but it’s new for you. Every evening, you must take two minutes to think of the day that has just passed and write down three things that you have achieved and are proud of.”

  “I’m not sure I accomplish that many brave deeds every day.”

  “It’s not about brave deeds. It can be really little acts, and not necessarily things you did at the office. Perhaps you took the time to help a blind man across the street, even though you were in a hurry. Perhaps you told a shopkeeper that he had made a mistake in your favor when he gave you change, or perhaps you told someone all the good things you think about them. You see, it can be absolutely anything, as long as it’s something you can be proud of. Moreover, it doesn’t have to be an action. You can be pleased with the way you reacted, with what you felt. Proud to have remained calm in situations where you would normally get worked up.”

  “I see.”

  I was a little disappointed. I was expecting him to give me a more important, more sophisticated task.

  “But do you really think that’s going to help me develop confidence in myself? It seems so simple.”

  “Ha! You can see that you’re not pure American! You can’t hide your French origins. For the French, an idea must necessarily be complex; otherwise it’s suspected of being simplistic! That’s probably why everything is so complicated in this country. People love getting worked up about things here!”

  It reminded me that he had an accent I’d never been able to identify.

  “To be honest,” he went on, “there is no miracle remedy that will give you confidence in yourself overnight. You must see the task I’m giving you as a little snowball. I’m pushing it from the top of the mountain, and if you go down with it for long enough, it will perhaps grow big enough to set off an avalanche of positive changes in your life.”

  I was convinced of one thing: Confidence in myself was the key to my equilibrium in a lot of areas. Developing it would contribute to giving me a fulfilled life.

  “This task,” he went on,
“will lead you to become aware of all the things you are doing well, of all you make a success of day by day. Little by little, you will learn to direct your attention to your good qualities, your values, all that makes you a good person. The feeling of your personal worth is going to be engraved in you gradually, until it becomes a certainty. From then on, no attack, no criticism, no blame will be able to unsettle you. It won’t touch you, and you’ll even have the luxury of forgiving your aggressor and feeling compassion for him.”

  I was a long way from imagining myself feeling compassion for Marc Dunker. It was no doubt a sign of how far I still had to go.

  Dubreuil got up.

  “Come on. I’ll show you out. It’s getting late.”

  I said good-bye to Catherine, who looked at me as if I were a laboratory rat, and followed Dubreuil. We went around the château via the garden. The fading daylight gave it a mysterious atmosphere.

  “It must be a lot of work to maintain a building and gardens of this size. I understand why you have staff.”

  “Indeed, it’s difficult to do without.”

  “And yet, I wouldn’t feel at home with all these people in the house. Do they stay day and night?”

  “No. They all go at ten o’clock. At night I am the only person who haunts the place.”

  We walked, without saying a word, to the tall black gate. An unsettling calm permeated the place. Stalin remained lying down but didn’t take his eyes off me, probably waiting for the auspicious moment to leap. I suddenly realized that behind him ranged not one but four kennels in a line.

  “Do you have four dogs?” I asked.

  “No, Stalin has four kennels just for him. Each day, he chooses the one he’s going to sleep in. No one but he knows which. He has a strong paranoid tendency.”

  I sometimes felt as if I’d stepped into a madhouse.

  I turned to Dubreuil. The light from the streetlamps made him look wan.

  “I’d like to know one thing, though,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re taking care of me, and I’m grateful, but I’d like to feel … free. When will you free me from my promise?”

  “Freedom has to be earned!”